


To Master Oneself

by amoeve



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Denial of Feelings, F/M, Implied Requited Love That Has Remained Unconsummated, M/M, Missing Scene, Possibly Unrequited Love, Praise Kink, Regenerations make tagging hard, Self-cest, Sex, and then Twelve was stubborn, because the Master was stubborn, isn't it ironic that my phone corrects "selfcest" to "self esteem"
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-07
Updated: 2017-09-07
Packaged: 2018-12-25 00:45:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12024531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amoeve/pseuds/amoeve
Summary: “Hashetasted you like this?” the Master’s voice is almost a snarl as he pushes the jacket from her shoulders.He doesn’t need to specify who he’s talking about. There’s only one other being in all of time and space who’s ever unleashed such a storm in them.





	To Master Oneself

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to the ever-wonderful [intentandinvention](https://archiveofourown.org/users/intentandinvention/pseuds/intentandinvention) for the beta. It’s entirely my own fault that I didn’t get this finished and published in the week before the series finale.
> 
> Special mention goes to mysterytour, who regularly reminds me that I need to write more porn.

_Now let us sport us while we may,_  
_And now, like amorous birds of prey,_  
_Rather at once our time devour_  
_Than languish in his slow-chapped power_.

— Andrew Marvell, ‘To His Coy Mistress’

*

“ _Give us a kiss._ ”

She raises an eyebrow at him. “You know me, dear. I don’t take orders.”

His smile is sweet, unassuming, and she is _so_ glad that this body has permanent bitchface because it feels so much more _honest_ than her younger self right now. “You seemed to be taking it pretty well when _he_ was in charge,” he purrs – but she can hear the claws in it.

Missy allows her other eyebrow to rise. “Don’t try our patience.” And then, glancing around: “I don’t remember this.” She refuses to make it a question: that would be a show of weakness.

“I thought that must be the case. A big spaceship sticking out of a black hole would be pretty memorable, ordinarily.” He tilts his head, his eyes flitting down to her feet and back up again.

She takes the opportunity to do a quick scan herself: the goatee, that’s a nice touch; and he seems to have overcome that skeletal need to eat people. That’s a relief, honestly. Missy’d hate to have to knock her younger self out because it looked like he was going to cannibalise her for parts.

Their eyes meet. “And of course, one would hope you’d remember the two of us, together…” he’s on the verge of leering at her.

“Yes, yes, time streams out of sync, can’t retain the memories…” Missy shrugs, expansively. “Whatever. It makes it more _exciting_! What are you up to? What am _I_ up to?” she twirls, which incidentally gives her the opportunity to check the shadows and see if he truly is alone. “Who cares? Girls just want to have fu-uun,” she half-sings, stepping closer to her younger self, scrutinising him more obviously this time. “Though I suppose you don’t remember the Eighties yet.” She sighs. “Great decade. _Great_ hair.”

As she scrutinises him, she realises that she’s really not sure about calling her younger self ‘the Master’. Not in her own head, anyway.

It’s not that she’s finally got used to the humans and their funny notions of biological sex having anything to do with your identity; nothing so uncouth. ‘Master’ fits just as well as ‘Mistress’.

She’s just – got used to having a name. ‘Missy’ sounds so much more _snappy_.

She tries not to laugh as she realises that the Doctor would be terribly confused and probably a little bit rude if he knew she’s enjoying having a name instead of a title. Time Lords aren’t supposed to be so plebeian.

Her younger self’s lips have twisted a little – contempt, amusement, curiosity perhaps? “Fun?”

“Plots,” she says, as if he’s stupid, “pillage, plunder. _You_ know. Business as usual.”

An eyebrow rises. He looks at her with – hm. He’s not impressed. Missy almost wants to say he looks scornful. “Being on Theta’s leash is business as usual?”

And _oh_ , the bitterness in his voice. She remembers that. She remembers having that particularly twisted fire burning in her belly.

Missy smirks at him, choosing amusement over anger, because oh, she _knows_ what’s down there under the disguise and the desperation for revenge. She remembers that body even if she doesn’t remember this exact moment.

And most of all, she remembers what that body _wants_. And what it will never have.

“You know better than that,” she says, and she takes a step towards her younger self, leaning in until she can feel the warmth of his body in this cold, cold room. “ _You_ know how much fun it is to play with him.”

Her younger self is still gazing at her – aloof, assessing. He knows that she’s implying that this is all part of her plan. He knows her better than anyone. “I recall,” he says, noncommittally.

He really doesn’t trust her yet. _Interesting_.

That means she can’t ask about whatever he’s been up to down here for all these years; they both know when someone is trying to extract information.

Missy wonders to herself why he’s playing his cards so close to his chest. There are three possibilities, and the first is that he thinks she’s prancing around with the Doctor by her own choice.

She knows herself. She’s sure that the cameras up in that room on top of the ship shifted because he had plenty of time to spot a materialising TARDIS. Several weeks, in fact, if her calculations on time dilation are correct.

What did he see? He’ll have sped up the recording to run it realtime, to gather as much information as possible.

So he is clearly pondering the possibility that she’s turned away from his own desire to set every world on fire just to watch the Doctor try to put out the flames. And, she knows, part of him must also, secretly, want to – or he wouldn’t fight so hard against it, and wouldn’t be so distrustful of her now.

The second option is that her younger self thinks she’ll try to take over his game. Or – and this one is perhaps the most likely – he’s got other plans in motion and he’s waiting to see where she fits.

He knows that, with them, the unexpected is always around the corner.

Which leaves Missy in a pickle, because she can’t express an interest in his TARDIS or his tools, and she can’t tell him what she really thinks. Which is, frankly, that he should get over his pointless, resentful pining for that long-gone Doctor.

She has one course of action: distract long enough to observe what he’s doing, go along for the ride, and then work it out for herself.

What can she use to gain her younger self’s trust?

There’s only one ever been one thing that distracted them long enough.

“You _recall_?” she repeats, snorting. She leans in, brushes her fingertips down his face. “Don’t lie to yourself. It doesn’t matter where you are, or what else you’re plotting. You remember what it was like to have him on a leash and you _want to have that again_.”

Her younger self’s dark eyes flash for a moment with desire. “I think,” he says, looking her up and down again, “that you’re trying to distract me.”

 _Get with the programme, sweetheart_ , she doesn’t say. She lets a smile play around the corners of her mouth. “Well, Theta’s busy, I’m in two minds about this whole thing… and you _did_ offer me a kiss.”

The Master smiles. “He’ll be busy for a while. Moping, I expect.”

Which tells her far too much about what happened to the Doctor’s favourite student.

She ignores it, for now. Ignores that strange thread of _oh no_ , that peculiar tingling moment of connection to an awareness that that will cause… pain.

Missy doesn’t attempt an innocent look – she knows herself too well. She just raises an eyebrow, expectantly.

He steps up to her and presses his lips – hers, her own earlier mouth – against her neck. The softness and warmth tickles her a little – and then he sinks his teeth in, and the pain is a thrill.

She rakes her fingers through his hair. It feels good, okay? She might be feeling a little bit odd about the squishy human probably not ending well because this ship is Mondasian –

He rears back and seizes her face in both hands, leaning into a hard, fast kiss.

Oh, fuck it. It feels _fantastic_.

Missy wraps one arm around his shoulder, feeling that particular feedback that says that part of her timestream is being rewritten, that she’s going to start remembering this as if it had always happened.

She’s getting flashes of it now, like moments of light sparkling on murky water as the memory sets in, temporarily bypassing the peculiar blanketing darkness of her timeline being out of joint because her earlier self is currently working open the buttons of her coat in search of her breasts.

“Has _he_ tasted you like this?” the Master’s voice is almost a snarl as he pushes the jacket from her shoulders.

He doesn’t need to specify who he’s talking about. There’s only one other being in all of time and space who’s ever unleashed such a storm in them.

“No.” It comes out as more of a longing hiss than she would like. She pulls his mouth to hers again.

It’s even mostly the truth. Her grey-haired Doctor has held her, stroked her hair, looked a little too long at her mouth (yes, she kissed him once, but he didn’t know it was her, how insulting he didn’t feel the truth and Time and fire in it).

Once – just once – he pressed his lips to her fingers.

And, it strikes her as her other self dumps her jacket on the floor, _that’s_ the ammo she has to distract him.

She drags her mouth from his, grasps his head in both hands, rests their foreheads together – and pushes it all into his mind. Everything she’s seen and screamed and sweated over since she’s been him:

The Vault, the boredom of her days, the Doctor bringing peculiar human food and books and opening, little by little, the shields around his mind. The strange heady sensations that came with truly feeling another Time Lord in this empty, echoing universe –

The way she liked to lie on the piano and wonder if he’s remembering their clumsy, childish kisses at the Academy, way back at the beginning of this whatever-they-are –

The way he looked at her sometimes, warm and thoughtful, and she had known that he was weighing this version of her against the one she’s holding now –

The way the Doctor’s face went dark and she glimpsed just a hint of desire when she screamed at him one night that he’d had his revenge for that time she kept him in a cage, he didn’t need to prove the point any longer, could he not just let her out and fuck her until the sun blew up?

But his face had cleared, and he’d said, quite calmly, “I respect you too much for that.”

That had been seven hundred years ago. Oh, how her anger had _blazed_. She’d tried to throw the piano at him, and he’d let her try, had let her smash it into splinters, and had stepped right up into her rage and had touched her arm, gently, and said, “Missy. I’m not going to leave you like this.”

And she had loathed him and loved him and hadn’t bothered with shielding. He’d felt everything broadcasting from her, and had still refused to put so much as his fingertips her skin.

And then he’d bought her a new piano.

Her younger self looks up at her and smirks as the visions in his head clear. “Untouched for all that time?” His hand snakes its way to her left breast and squeezes, hard, as if he’s testing the ripeness of a fruit and doesn’t care that it’s going to bruise. “What a _pity_.”

His kiss is vicious, this time, and she swears she hears a button drop to the floor as he tears her blouse open.

She retaliates by reaching up to take hold of his throat, cupping the bottom of his jaw on the membrane between her fingers and thumb. “I think,” she says into his mouth as he bites her lip, “that he thinks – ” she tugs at his shirt “ – he’s _courting_ me.”

“Disgraceful,” he says, biting at her neck again. “You’re perfect as you are. Now,” he says, leaning back, and she tugs the worn linen shirt up over his head, “yes, these fucking rags, get them _off_ me – ”

“He wouldn’t want to keep us as we are,” she points out, as his shirt lands on top of her jacket, because she knows that’s a sore spot; she knows that this version of herself died rather than take Theta’s offer of permanent companionship, offered in front of human witnesses, wanting to make Koschei his _problem_ , his _pet_ –

Not accepting that they could be his _partner_.

She lets her remembered frustration bleed through the shields around her mind, and she watches her younger self’s face change.

“He’s _training_ us,” he snarls, pushing her up against the console. Missy kicks the chair out of the way, tugging him over to the flattest part of the surface.

If she’s going to fuck him, she’s not going to do so with keys and toggles digging into her arse, thank you _very_ much.

“He thinks he’s helping us,” she reminds her younger self as she tugs him closer.

“The arrogance of it, that hypocritical bastard – ” he pushes her skirt up, sliding his palms along her thighs “ – prattling on about _freedom_ and look what he’s done to us – ”

 _He’s trying to give us our freedom_ , she doesn’t say, as she bites at his ear and then leans down to pull her skirt up further, tug him between her legs. _He’s trying to set us free from ourself._

“I set a psychology book on fire once when he tried to make me read it,” she says instead, dreamily, running her hands up his back and lifting her hips slightly to let him get her skirt out of the way. “Once I was done laughing, anyway.”

She doesn’t mention that that was, oh, forty or so years into her imprisonment, or that these days, she’d probably at least read it to the end – if only to leave mocking notes in the margins.

Her younger self laughs, his fingertips skimming over her most sensitive spots as he realises she isn’t wearing any kind of stupid Earth underwear to go with her human costume. “Delightful,” he sighs, and she’s not sure if he’s talking about the book-burning episode, or about her. Or both.

And then she’s throwing her head back as he tugs her onto him, sliding all the way inside in one smooth, searing thrust.

“Fuck,” he gasps, and she agrees with a “Yes,” that’s really, if she’s being objective about it, expressed more as a guttural groan and her hands clenching in his hair.

“Oh, _fuck_ ,” he mutters, and she feels the heat thrum through her as he thrusts in again, dropping his head onto her shoulder for a second.

Missy kicks him on the arse with the heel of her boot. “What are you, a fixed point in time? Don’t just _stop_ ,” she snaps, slamming her hands down on the edge of the console to push herself up, to find an angle that lets her move herself against him.

His head snaps up, and he pulls out and drives in again, setting a punishing pace. “Better?” he hisses as he slides in, out, in again.

“ _Much_ ,” she purrs, leaning forward to sink her teeth into his neck. He throws an arm around her waist and hauling her closer to him. Her heel is still pressing against his flesh.

He half-laughs, half-gasps against her, and she feels flashes of his mind, now – the pleasure, and the pleasure at the pain she inflicts on him.

She remembers with an odd, twisted thrill that her younger self had been a masochist. And that he’d hidden it from everyone with an obsessive desire to see one person in particular break through and take possession.

 _Oh_ , she thinks, and she smiles, reaching up again to grab and handful of his hair, tugging his face up to hers. “Don’t forget,” she says, “I know this won’t ever be enough for you.”

The Master leans back for a second, deep inside her. “What are you implying? You know that I’ve always preferred my own company.” He runs the tip of his tongue over her lips.

“I’ve been you,” Missy reminds him, and she drags her nails across the back of his neck. He thrusts harder. “And not even I,” she says as she wraps her hand around the back of his head, pulling him ever closer, “can give you what you want.”

“And what is that?” he growls, and if she were free, enjoying this on her own terms, Missy would tip back her head and laugh.

But she isn’t. Because, by all the lights of the lost Citadel, she’s actually grown as a person.

She’s kind of disgusted at herself.

So she leans in to murmur into his ear, “You might have put him in a cage, but I remember what you dreamt about. You wanted to run your hands through that _ridiculous_ hair and bite that long, lovely throat. But that wasn’t all of it, was it, my dear?”

“No,” he groans, and she knows that he’s resisting the memories of night after night sliding into Lucy, into dozens of human men and women and never feeling that bass thrill-hum-tingle in the place in his brain that only another Time Lord can reach and _the only other Time Lord was keeping his mind locked firmly away –_

“You want,” she whispers, and it’s a whisper because it is still true for her, and this is private, and painful, and she resents sharing it even with herself, even as she fucks herself, “him to tell you how _good_ you are. You want him to fill you, and surround you, you want to feel it in your body and your blood and your _brain_ ,” and well, fuck, she’s turning herself on now.

The Doctor’s going to be terribly upset about that if he ever finds out about it. He never did approve of her methods, but if he founds out she actually enjoyed herself, well. She’ll never hear the end of it.

“ _No_ ,” the Master insists, but he’s breathless, driving even faster now, and isn’t that so telling about what he really wants?

 _Aren’t I always_ , she reflects. “You want to please him,” she murmurs, “but we both know, don’t we, more than anything else – ”

“He _forgave_ me,” the Master howls, his fingers gripping her thighs as he slams into her, and she remembers that Doctor, fierce, gentle, holding her past self in his arms, and how his terrible compassion had seared into her mind, because compassion meant he was looking  _down_ on them, he didn’t see them as an equal any more –

“It wasn’t enough,” she says, running her hands through his hair, tenderly this time. “Was it?”

He groans again. “ _No_.” 

That’s the first truth she’s had from him.

“And now he’s two thousand years in the past. More,” Missy says, swallowing down a sadness that she shouldn’t feel, because she’s seen more of the Doctor this last millennium than she ever thought she would. “You’ll never know that Doctor, dear,” she says, softly, running her nails across her younger self’s scalp. 

He bites at her collarbone. “I should have had him when I had the chance,” he hisses.

“You say that now,” she says, and then, reflectively: “He was taller than us. I remember wanting to know what that felt like.”

“I wanted him to worship me,” the Master insists, pressing another kiss to her mouth.

She runs a fingertip down his face, trailing the soft skin at the edge of his beard. “Don’t lie to yourself,” she says, and he’s getting less coordinated now, this strange confessional apparently doing wonders for his approaching orgasm.

“What do we want?” she whispers.

He buries his face in her chest, and whatever he chokes out, nobody else would be able to hear it.

Missy knows.

She’s the only person alive who knows Theta’s real name, and she knows what was gasped out against her breasts.

She answers herself, touching his forehead with her fingertips and pushes the thought into his mind, feels his torrent of rage and lust and pain and lies and _love_ , feels that symphony resonating on a level that aliens just don’t _get_ , the delicious echo of another Time Lord’s consciousness chiming in time with your own:

“ _We want him to praise us_.”

It branches like lightning between her minds, then and now, the action creating memories of the action, synapses sparking as her brain rewrites the history and the bright white rush of time crashes around them –

She remembers it as she falls into the light, wanting the Doctor, any Doctor, to turn to her with love and pride in his eyes and to say _Well done, my dear one, well done_.

“No,” he pants, but she knows, because she was him, once, that he is lying to himself.

“Yes,” she hisses, and thinks of her Doctor telling her _good, yes, you’re so good, Missy_ – and hides the truth from her other self as they cry out together.

*

Missy comes back to herself, gasping, a few moments later. She remembers to glance down and smile and behave like this was spontaneous, like it isn’t part of a plan to win over her younger self and get him off-balance at the same time. “Better?” she smiles at him, leaning back a little on the console.

“But of course.” He smirks at her. “I always did enjoy my own company. And now,” he says, eyeing her breasts, “we should go and see the sad look on Theta’s face when he realises how much he’s failed his friend.”

He tweaks her nipple and turns away to open one of the cupboards lining the console room, humming cheerfully to himself.

Missy watches him as she re-fastens her blouse and jacket. “I hope this doesn’t crease,” she says, mock-seriously, as she stands, settling her skirt back down her legs. “I hate to seem self-indulgent in a crisis.”

Plus, she thinks ruefully, Theta’s going to have a fit if he thinks she’s been fucking around while he’s been freaking out. ‘I’ve been scheming’ never seems to go down well with him. Especially not if there’s sex involved.

“ _I_ don’t,” her younger self says, pulling black clothes from the depths of one storage unit.

“I do so admire anyone who plans their couture needs ahead of time,” she says, and it’s even true.

He grins at her over his shoulder as he pulls trousers on, and then puts an arm into one sleeve. 

Missy tuts at him. “You’ll stretch it if you do that,” she scolds, because she’s always had a weakness for good tailoring.

“Give yourself a hand, then,” he says, passing it to her.

She holds it for him as he turns into it, fixing his collar as he buttons himself up. “I do love a well cut coat,” she says, relishing the Ts between her teeth.

“Well I wasn’t going to him wearing those stinking rags,” he snorts.

Her younger self is so _angry_ , she reflects. Angry, and proud, and resentful. She’d felt so cool and in control at the time.

Of course, she’s not entirely sure what he’s feeling at this moment, because she still can’t remember this. She’s getting fits and flashes, now – impressions, more than anything. Their time streams might have – hah – collided, but she’s still not sure what’s going to happen next.

“We can’t have him disrespecting us, can we,” Missy agrees, covering her own concern. It’s time she took the upper hand, here, and she’s not quite sure how to proceed.

“ _You_ can talk,” he says – or begins to say, because she slaps him across the mouth, hard. _Much better_ , she thinks.

“That’s quite enough of that,” Missy says, firmly – and his eyes dilate, and for a second she thinks he’s angry with her, but then he starts to laugh. “I’m tired of all these bitchy implications that I’m dancing to the Doctor’s tune.”

“You’re not toothless, after all.” He sounds genuinely delighted, and then: “You should do that again sometime.”

She rolls her eyes. “You jump to conclusions. Slow down, brother, feel the music, the _ambience_ in the room, yeah? Not everything needs to be done fast.” She leans in. “And I’m sure I’ll find the time to do it again. More than once.”

He pauses over a button. “Is that a comment on our little encounter?” he glances at the half-destroyed console, apparently needing to clarify if her references to speed are to his current plan, or to their brief liaison. “I just spent ten years nursing his latest pet while I waited for him to arrive,” he says, with some irony. “You’ll forgive me if I’m a little impatient for the action to begin.”

Missy has spent nearly a thousand years waiting for the Doctor to see her as an equal, but she knows her old distaste for idleness the way a tiger knows a concrete cage is not the right prey for its claws.

“Yuck,” she says, as if she can’t bear the thought of ten years in the same place, away from Time Lord technology and civilised life. “No wonder you needed a distraction. I shan’t even ask why you’re slumming it with Mondasians.”

“For fun,” he smiles, quoting her. “Now, shall we go and show him how the game is played?”

That’s when she knows he’s accepted her. He’s going to tell her the plan.

Missy plants another kiss on that expressive mouth first – long, and lingering. “Let’s do this again,” she says, and is pleased to see that he looks seriously distracted when she pulls away.

He grins at her. “It would be my pleasure.”

She leaves the room first, because that’s the only way her younger self won’t see the look on her face.

Now that she’s outside the swirl of misaligned time caused by being in two places at once, she can feel the Doctor’s distress.  _Theta_ , she thinks, and doesn’t say aloud, _what have you done to me?_

Missy squares her shoulders, clicks her heels together, and wonders at the choices she makes.

**Author's Note:**

> We all noticed that the Master changes clothes before he reappears with Missy, right? And that Missy/Master is canon now? 
> 
> The title of the episode also comes from ‘To His Coy Mistress’, a poem attempting to persuade a young woman to surrender her virginity to her lover. 
> 
> The opening lines are ‘Had we but world enough and time, / This coyness, lady, were no crime’. 
> 
> Which left me asking a whole host of questions: whose mistress? What coyness? Does Steven Moffat actually know that it’s about sex, or did he just think the title was funny, because Missy’s never been coy in her life? Is he implying that she’s in love with the Doctor? Or that the Doctor is in love with her? Why doesn’t a thousand years in the vault count as world enough and time? Is it actually the Doctor who’s being coy here? 
> 
> Ah, the essays I could write on metaphysical poetry, sex, and Doctor Who. 
> 
> I wrote porn instead.


End file.
